


Since I Can't Remember When

by Nifflers_and_Crookshanks



Series: It's Been A Long, Long Time [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agent Carter (TV) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Cause I'm original like that, F/M, It's Been A Long Long Time inspired, Spoliers, Steggy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-15 23:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18679606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nifflers_and_Crookshanks/pseuds/Nifflers_and_Crookshanks
Summary: Autumn 1948 Peggy Carter moves back to New York. Spring 1949 she receives an unexpected visitor.





	Since I Can't Remember When

It’s Autumn 1948 when Peggy Carter moves back to New York city and realises she’s missed it. Something about the cool and crisp October air is comforting, exactly what she needs after the dry California heat that seemed to sap the life out of her. Three months after Daniel, enough to convince herself that the move had nothing to do with their bitter end. It’s freeing, almost. New York still holds memories, heavy, clouded memories weighed down by the ever present emptiness that’s him - or rather was. That sunset on the Brooklyn Bridge was symbolic, the beginning of an end to her mourning, but she is yet to end it truly. Peggy begins to doubt she ever will, heels clicking against the pavement as she walks from skyscrapers to brownstones with his ghost at her side.

Angie, for one, is glad she’s back, even if the New York office is less than pleased by her reappearance.

“English, it’ll be good for us,” She promises, linking arms with her as they make their way to the diner they so often frequented. “Friends reunited!”

They’ve both donned coats against the slight chill in the wind, Peggy in faithful deep blue and Angie in the most expensive fur coat she could find, part of her new spending habits after a successful run on broadway. Despite them, they still feel the cold front the winds bring in from the harbour. Peggy relishes in it until her mind drifts to arctic sea ice and a watery grave.

“What’ll yah have? Coffee and apple pie or tea and your bread pudding?” Her friend asks in the chirpy way only she could, and Peggy is surprised by how easily she smiles. After three years in the United States she choses the apple pie. Something different. Something new. The world needs and so does she.

“Men are all the same, in the end,” Angie sighs, warming her hands on her cup of coffee. “I’ve had enough of them,”

“It wasn’t his fault,” Peggy says, “Not really. Daniel did nothing wrong. He’s a good man,”

It just didn’t work out. She tried. She really tried and it didn’t work out.

“You loved him?”

“Yes, I did,” She says it so softly Angie almost misses it. She’s reflective today, her mind somewhere else. Her friend does not miss her chance for more information, however, the tightly sealed lips of a spy loose when she’s in a pensive mood.

“How many’s that, then?” She asks, “Men you’ve loved?”

“What?” Peggy asks, surprised.

“I have been in love with five men,” Angie declares, “And a half, if you count some misguided fantasies when I was fifteen,” At her friends silence the blonde pushes forward, “C’mon English, you never tell me anything. This is just the time to start sharing. I know there were others,” Others Peggy never talked about.

“Three,” She answers after a quiet moment, “Three men,”

“Daniel was one of them?”  
“Yes,”

“And the first was your fiancé,”

“Fred,”

Lieutenant Frederick Wells, Home Office. She met him at Bletchley Park, a code breaker collaborating with his unit as they strategised responses to intercepted German telegrams. He was patient and sincere and would always flash her a smile when she passed over the decoded messages. It was 1941, and her twenty year old heart fluttered every time their eyes met. She did not even pause before agreeing to his proposal, a man in uniform down on one knee by the Highgate ponds on Hampstead Heath. She didn’t pause to think on the S.O.E offer either, so far removed was it from her idea of herself and her future, their future. A quiet life. She had thought she wanted to sit through the war and when they found peace she would settle into a quiet life. Peggy Carter had been told so many times that she could not do what she wanted to do until she forgot she wanted to do it. But Michael hadn’t forgotten and she remember too, in time. Fred had quietly accepted her decision, almost meekly so, and they parted ways amicably.

“You haven’t told me much about him,” Angie says.

“There isn’t much to tell. Just a small romance in the end,”

“And the other?”

“What?” Peggy blinks, half because she does not understand and half because she does. She only hopes Angie is not asking what she thinks she is.

“There’s Fred and there’s Daniel, but you said three,” Angie continues on, oblivious to her friends reluctance.

It’s like she’s hit cold water, the breath knocked out of her lungs with the fierce shriek of cracking ice, and Peggy tries not to gasp for air. There’s no hot sting of tears, no shuddering sobs, just the cold seeping into her bones and freezing her blood.

“I,” Peggy doesn’t know how to begin, how to answer, “I…”

“I know there was some war-time love affair you haven’t told me about,” Angie fixes her friend with her sharp, knowing look, and even as skilled as Peggy is in concealing secrets she has never been able to hide from her scrutinising gaze. “That photograph you have, the one with the handsome blonde boy?”

She almost cries then. Almost. It is by some miracle she doesn’t.

There is a framed photograph on her bedside table, one of the few personal effects she has allowed herself to take out of her suitcase and set up in Angie’s guest room. Her friend has seen it before. It was always on Peggy’s dresser in the apartment of Howard Starks’ they had shared. Every time Angie had seen it she had only smiled knowingly, remembering fond memories of her own she had made with men in uniform. She had never questioned it before.

“Was that a big romance?”

“Yes,” Peggy breathes, “Yes, it was,”

She is shakier now, not so obviously as to cause a scene but Angie knows her well enough to see it. She reaches her hand across the table and folds Peggy’s fingers into hers in a reassuring squeeze.

“You loved him like you loved the others,”

“No,” Peggy has to suppress the bitter laugh rising in her throat, “I loved Fred and I loved Daniel, but not like him,”

She had loved them both when she was with them and parted when she loved them no longer. Respect and affection remained, an admiration for the good men that in their own small ways had left their mark on her, but the love did not linger. With him, with Steve… She would always love him, the heavy emptiness in her chest was a testament to it. Perhaps Peggy had fought it at first, tried her best to say goodbye, but a little vial of blood poured into a river could not rid her of her memories of him, of her dreams of him.

On nights when she longed for the cold winter days she’d fall asleep dreaming of light dustings of snow and awake with terrors of icy water filling her lungs and the roar of an engine in her ears. She’s nearly drowned enough times to know the fear, know the pain a death at sea was. But there were other times too, other times when she was enveloped in the warmth from his eyes and his arms as they danced to a slow tune. She’d return to wakefulness slowly and the happy glow in her chest would gradually fade away as reality set in. Those were the harder of the two dreams and the harder of the two mornings.

“The love of your life?” Angie breaths, and her crestfallen face tells Peggy she needs not explain further. She knows. She knows he was one of the ones that did not come back home.

_The love of my life and the right partner, too._

* * *

Peggy spends Christmas with her parents for the first time since the war. It’s not the same as it was before, but then again nothing is. She’s change, they’ve changed, nothing will be as it once was and perhaps it’s for the best. The only ones unchanged by war are monster.

The back garden is dusted by snow and even though every winter of her childhood was spent in that very place, slaying ice dragons with her brother and making men out of snow, it looks like another world. She doesn’t recognise it, or herself.

“She misses him,” Her father offers as an explanation for her mothers distant silence.

Amanda Carter, broken by her son’s death, has grown into a quiet woman in her twilight years, wearied by heartache. Peggy can only thank her brother for leaving her with a purpose, something to drive her forward beyond the sorrow she feels. There are still adventures to be had, mysteries to solve and the memory of another to honour and cherish.

“She’d feel better if you had someone, Peg,” Harrison says in a hushed tone over some late night whiskey. “She worries about you over there, all by yourself,”

Agent Carter as a rising member of the Strategic Scientific Reserve is probably one of the safest women in the United States, but Peggy knows when best to remain quiet.

“I’m not alone, Dad,” She says, despite the contrary. Except this time she doesn’t particularly mind it.

When she returns home she settles into her solitude. She finds a small house just out of the city, quaint but with space to breath. Peggy vows to make it into a place where things grow when the sun returns. It will be full of flowers, her own little sanctuary where she might sit beneath the great tree on the law reading with tea in hand. When the stresses of the job grow too much she retreats into her imagination and finds solace in the small pleasures the future will bring.

And the stresses of the job are numerous. It’s 1949 and the S.S.R, a war time organisation, is falling apart at the seams. There is no war anymore, or rather none like any they have ever fought before. There are no defined battlefields, no one discernible enemy, no acknowledged animosity and looming over it all is the threat of nuclear destruction. The S.S.R is on it’s knees, out of touch and out of time, if Peggy had learnt anything in the last few years it was that.

It’s Howard’s idea, though Phillips readily endorses it, the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. The S.S.R was based in one goal; to win. To defeat their enemies and win the war. But there was no war to be won. S.H.I.E.LD, as they have begun to fondly call it, is founded on another principal; protect. That is a mission Peggy is proud to participate in. Soon the S.S.R will be dissolved and absorbed into this new life force, but first there is groundwork to do and Peggy finds herself working tireless hours in the office trying to keep the S.S.R together and then at home creating an intelligence agency and military organisation.

In the Spring of 1949 Peggy Carter finds herself content. She is not happy, exactly, but content is the right word for it. She is doing what she excels at, work, and is nothing but dedicated to it. If she is honest, she thrives. More and more she chooses to go through her stacks of paper work at home, slowly removing herself from the S.S.R piece by piece so she might build a greater organisation. It’s calming, to work in silence as the world goes by outside, flowers sprouting from the earth until colour has returned and she lives in a garden of her own.

From her desk Peggy watches the tree branches sway in the wind and listens to the happy chirps of young birds. She looks up from her work every so often to scan the sun dappled lawn, hand gliding across paper to leave only looping ink calligraphy, and breathes. It is a very peaceful day.

Until there is a knock on the door, that is.

1 p.m on a Wednesday and there is someone knocking on Peggy Carter’s door. She is not used to visitors. Howard notifies her in advance if he is in town, usually sending Jarvis around with a car so that he himself does not venture out into the suburbs, and Angie is away on tour. Once or twice neighbours have called to introduce themselves, freshly baked pies in hand to match their white picket fences and perfect smiles, but generally that happens later on in the day when their kids are back from school. No, Peggy is not used to visitors. She carefully sets her pen aside and slides open the desk draw, brightly coloured fingertips wrapping around the loaded gun.

A part of her has this missed this she realises as she steps into the hall, blood pulsing as fear and some unidentifiable thing so very close to bravery courses through her. The danger, the chase. She almost hopes it’s some adversary or rival, Dottie perhaps, something thrilling to draw her out of her incomplete peace. Peggy steels herself before the door, breathing a shuddering breath as her shoulders tense and grip tightens, finger barely hovering over the trigger. Through the sheer curtain covering the glass she can see an imposing shadow and she’s already geared for a fight.

Nothing could have prepared her, however, for the sight she finds on the other side.

“Hey, Peggy,” He whispers.

His eyes are the same beautiful blue, brighter than the sky and all the much dearer. His hair catches the warm sunlight and his lips are a gentle smile only for her. She thinks she will fall to pieces then and there. He is glorious and humble in the same moment, just as he always was, but what little else there is of her memories is splintered in fragments across him. Had she forgotten how tired he looked, battle weary and scarred? Or had her dreaming summoned up a phantom distorted? There are crinkles around his eyes and across his forehead, worry lines even the war had not brought, and there is a darkening in the layers of his hair with the slightest tinge of what might be the starting of grey at his temples. He is older. But Steve Rogers never had the chance to grow old, he never had the time. How strange a hallucination. Or a sinister plot. Espionage’s finest development in technology.

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am,”

_How very confident for an imposter._

“Who are you?” She repeats. Her voice is as stern as the steel she points to his forehead.

“Peggy,” He says slowly, open hands rising in a show of peace, “Peggy, it’s me,”

“How dare you,”

With a sigh he moves to reach into his pocket and she takes a tense step towards him.

“Keep your hands where I can see them!”

“It’s okay,” He says, meeting her eyes. Years of training, years of experience, and she falters in his gaze, so full of trust that she can’t help but believe him. Her heart beats faster as she watches his hand draw out of his pocket, curled around a small metal object that has been scratched, broken and battered, not unlike him, but still so very recognisable.

“Where did you get that?” Peggy has never before felt the rage she feels, a rising fire that burns through her insides corroding any sense, any caution or patience. She does not know who this man is, but she knows where the compass is from, where he would have found. Would he have pried it, she wonders, from his corpse? Or was the man before him merely in the business of grave robbing and not the desecration of bodies?

“I’m sorry I’m late,”

“For what?” She almost hisses, eyes flickering between him and the compass.

“For our date,” Peggy freezes, her heart stopping. No one had known of his last words, of their silly promises over the radio. Tears had streaked down her cheek and then the line buzzed with static. “Saturday, eight o’clock at the Stork Club,”

She lowers the gun.

“Steve,” She breaths, voice shuddering as water wells in her eyes, “You’re alive,”


End file.
